I’m sorry, I messaged her. I didn’t say for what, exactly.
Hours later she replied: It’s okay. She didn’t specify what it was, what was okay.
Alice was gone, Stella wasn’t around but it was “okay,” and David texted to say he would be late again. Our house was like a boat on the sea. The Aunt Esther. Occasionally I walked around on deck, jumped overboard for a swim, but mostly I stayed inside, in my quarters. There was entertainment (movies, on the couch) and there was dining (our fridge). Our house was a cruise ship. With one passenger. I wasn’t sure who the captain was.
I watched Je, Tu, Il, Elle by Chantal Akerman. A young woman, played by Akerman herself, has just moved in to an apartment—a furnished room that she unfurnishes. She doesn’t leave for days, she handwrites letters, she undresses but doesn’t change her clothes—an oversized dark button-up shirt, thick, comfy socks. She sleeps on a sheetless twin mattress. And she eats powdered sugar by the spoonful from a paper bag. Once, twice, three times, and then steadily—jabbing the spoon into the bag and ceaselessly into her mouth. It’s a repetitive, gluttonous act, a combination of compulsion and freedom, of carelessness and focused engagement. She is drifting, without going anywhere. She lies on the mattress and listens to herself breathing. She waits and waits. She looks at her reflection in the windows at night, naked. She looks straight at the camera and smiles beautifully. A half hour into the film, she finally puts on a different outfit, a kind of shiny vinyl, white-zippered jacket over a T-shirt, leaves the room, and heads out to a highway where she hitches a ride with a truck driver, for the film’s second act. They go to rest-stop diners, she gives him a hand job while he talks about his family, she watches him shave in a bathroom. Or rather, we watch her watch him. Eventually, she goes to the apartment of an ex-girlfriend, presumably, and they spend one night together. She eats Nutella sandwiches and they have sex that sort of looks like two marble statues wrestling.
I’d watched this film analytically, academically, the first time I’d seen it, years ago for an undergraduate class. I’d watched it because I’d had to, because it was assigned. I’d recognized what I thought I was supposed to recognize—the attention it pays to its subject and the attention it demands of its audience. Here is a young woman, just being. But I hadn’t fully comprehended how daring that was. Not simply for its time—1974—but still. For Akerman to have the confidence to think: this is worth filming, worth watching.
The character reminded me of Stella. Akerman’s hair, in the black and white, was dark as ink and glossy, like Stella’s. And what did Stella do alone in the bunk, at night? Aside from play jacks. But the character reminded me more of myself now. She’d been there all along, only I hadn’t recognized her.
I hadn’t identified with this work in any real emotional way the first time I saw it, despite the fact that Akerman was in her early twenties when she wrote and directed it, around the age I had been then. Around Stella’s age. I had been too close to it, then, maybe. I had had, on some level, this never-spoken thought: I could do that or something like it. Make something like that. A thought both admiring and dismissive, a thought you can have only when your own creative ambition is still coalescing but untested. When who knew what you were capable of in all the time you had ahead of you? I registered the self-belief that Akerman must have had and inwardly took it as a kind of competitive challenge. I took it for granted, that such self-belief could be sustained, that it didn’t disappear one day. I needed distance for this movie to floor me, to become something whose very existence astonished me. To come to see that self-belief for the fleeting, elusive wonder that it was. I had to be alone on the living room couch, years later, in the afternoon, in Aunt Esther’s house at Alder, all that time behind me.
Two days passed and I saw a little more of David but nothing of Stella. Going forward, I figured, she would stay here, quietly, out of our way, as she did before we knew she was here, and then she would leave or we would leave. A final performance was never announced, but something had ended. So where would our ardency and our ecstasy go? Where would that way of being alive in the world go?
I tried to put a little of it into a new phase that would start with the prospect of this job at Samira’s company. Our second conversation was scheduled and I hadn’t asked for Stella’s help in choosing clothes this time. I decided on a black shirtdress, with the right amount of shape, that I’d steamed in the night and hung in the corner of my bedroom, where I’d set out everything else I’d need to go with it today at Samira’s office: a notebook with my initials stamped in gilt, my heels and my flats, a bronze cuff, my mascara, my lipstick, my structured-but-not-severe leather tote. Competent adult. Stylish enough co-worker. I was double-checking my underwear situation when there was a knock on the front door that didn’t stop.
It was Stella, but Stella as I’d never seen her. Anxious, jittery, pale, out of breath. Holding her phone in her palm like it was a small, stiff, dead thing she didn’t know what to do with, except extend it toward me. I took it from her, though I had no idea what to do with it either. It had been off, she explained, last night, and she’d woken up to a series of short, disturbing texts from Alice and an even more distressing voice mail. I was still holding the phone but Stella was operating it, playing the voice mail on speaker, both of us leaning over the device, like surgeons over an operating table.
It’s me. Please call me. I need help. Please. I’m so alone. I’m scared. I don’t know what to do. Please call me. Please.
Alice’s voice. But strange and small. Not Alice-like at all. And she hadn’t been responding or picking up when Stella had continually tried to reach her this morning. It was Friday. I’d sent Alice away on Tuesday night.
Did you see her leave on Tuesday night? Have you talked to her since? Has she done anything like this before?
I asked Stella questions, I’m not sure in what order, I wasn’t entirely conscious of asking them, and I absorbed answers the same way.
Stella was upset with Alice when she left and wanted time apart, Alice had said things once or twice that seemed to come from a place she usually kept well-hidden. They hadn’t talked but they’d texted, nothing serious, though.
“Do you know where she is?” I asked.
“No. Her apartment? But she could be anywhere. What do I do?”
“Do you know her neighbors? Or the super for her building?”
“Not really. No.”
“All right. We’ll go, together, and find her, check on her. I’ve got the car today, I have this interview, so we’ll drive to Cambridge, wherever Alice lives, and we’ll start there.”
“You have another interview—”
“It’s not ’til later. It’ll be fine. Or we’ll figure it out.”
I gathered up everything I had set out and we took off.
Stella, I kept assuring her on the road, try not to worry, though my own insides were turning to lead. The highway drive was quick, uneventful, but the red lights on local roads were excruciating. Still, we got there in under an hour. A brick apartment building on a tree-lined street. Stella knew the code for the lobby doors and I tried to keep pace as she took the stairs in twos to the third floor, where Alice lived. She hit the buzzer, she knocked hard.
Hold on, we heard. An unhurried, male voice on the other side. The lock turning with no real urgency.
“Hey, what’s up,” he said. Not because he knew or recognized either of us but because, I sensed, this was how he greeted the world. Even when the world was banging frantically at the door. An easygoing, confident, young white man. In boxer briefs.
“Is Alice here?” Stella asked.
“Yeah. Alice. She’s in the shower.”
“Is she okay?”
“Yeah? She’s fine. I mean, why wouldn’t she be?”
Stella stared at him.
“I mean, I don’t know. You want to see for yourselves?”
“Who are you?” Stella asked.
“I’m Brian.”
; “Okay. Brian—” Stella stopped, at a loss for what to say.
“Why don’t you guys come in. She’ll be out in a minute. I’m sure it’s fine.”
Brian’s trusting faith in appearances. We were strangers but he didn’t rate us as any kind of threat. How did he rate us? He was sure it was fine, all of it. We went inside, the two of us standing there with Brian in his underwear, who noticed I was winded and asked me if I’d like a glass of water. He didn’t go so far as to call me “ma’am.”
“No, I’m fine,” I said, waving his offer away. “Thanks.” Thanks?
Stella, who knew this place, its parquet floors and plaster walls, glanced around for a clue, some sign to help her make sense of what was happening, when Alice came out of the bathroom, one towel wrapped around her body, the other around her head.
“What the fuck?” Alice said.
“What the fuck? Are you fucking kidding me, Alice?” said Stella.
“What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know, trying to make sure you’re not dead?”
Alice frowned. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah, Brian told us. And by the way, who are you, Brian?”
“He’s a friend,” Alice answered. Fixing me with a hard look.
Brian, finally, took Alice’s tone as a cue to go to the other room and get dressed.
“You can’t do this,” Stella cried. She didn’t seem to be addressing what Alice was doing so much as how she was doing it. The injustice of her detachment.
“Stella, calm down,” said Alice.
“No, you don’t get to tell me that. You leave this alarming shit on my phone and then, what, you couldn’t pick up your phone because you were too busy fucking Brian this morning?”
“I’m sorry.” Her manner softened. It was as if saying the words loosened something in Alice, the part of her that truly was sorry, the part that had left that voice mail.
“I don’t—I just—Jesus fucking Christ.”
Now Stella was the winded one. And Alice, for the first time I’d ever seen, was abashed. She moved to stand close to Stella, trying to find some way to shape her body around Stella’s stiff but trembling stance, and she spoke into the space between them in that strange, small voice again. A supplicating voice. Her bath towel opened and fell to the floor but she didn’t pick it up. She didn’t even notice. How many times was I going to see her naked? Only this was so different from that first encounter outside the bunk, when her nakedness had seemed like armor. Now she was a soft creature without its shell. I couldn’t entirely make out what she said, but it sounded like an expression of need. I needed you. And then I didn’t want to need you. So I went out. And I’m so sorry and I hate it, I hate it.
Stella shook her head like if she shook it hard enough she could make Alice, this situation, vanish. Then she turned and ran out into the hallway. Alice didn’t move except to lift her eyes and look to me as if for help. A look of such messed-up need and pathos that I wanted to help her, safely wrap her back up in the towel. Except my loyalty lay with Stella, who I went after, following her as she rushed down the stairs, out of the lobby, onto the sidewalk. We sat on the curb and she covered her mouth with her hand, squeezed her eyes shut, and sobbed.
I put my arms around her while she cried so hard, so ceaselessly that it was as if I were rocking her. The two of us in a kind of rhythmic trance for I don’t know how long, until eventually, she sniffed a little, took one rattled breath and then another. Stella, on good terms with Robin Dart, didn’t need another mother. But I suppose I still needed a child.
Alice was troubled enough, wise enough, ashamed enough, worried for herself enough, something enough not to come down to the street. If she’d sent Brian away, he must have used a back door or hurried past as I was consoling Stella.
“Let’s go,” I said, helping Stella to her feet.
“I’m sorry I dragged you here for this.”
“Don’t be sorry.”
By the clock in the car, I had an hour and a half until my meeting with Samira.
“I can cancel it, reschedule it,” I said.
“No, that would be dumb,” she said.
I decided to keep the appointment and in the meantime I took Stella for lunch, to a sandwich shop, where she remained quiet, in her own head, and didn’t eat much. Stay here, I told her, instructed her, while I went to change clothes. What would I have done if she took off? She wouldn’t take off. I had earned her compliance, if not her trust.
In the washroom, I was wilted and salty with my dried sweat and Stella’s tears. I had done this before in a bathroom in Boston. Years ago, removing what I had on and getting into the clean shirt that belonged to Nick. This bathroom was nicer, better lit. But there I was, again, putting on a black shirt—shirtdress, more wrinkled now, not so unlike the shirt Chantal Akerman wore in the unfurnished room—and trying to muss my hair in a stylish way. Would it be good enough for Samira, would it make her look twice, make her want me? I didn’t know, but it would have to do.
“You look good,” Stella said, called back to the moment, to what was in front of her, when I reappeared. “Confident.”
“Thanks,” I said. Still boosted by her opinion, still trusting her judgment, on this at least.
When we got to Fort Point, Stella told me she’d stay in the car.
“You’ll roast in the car.”
“Then I’ll go to a coffee shop or something.”
“No, just come up. It’s like a lounge. It’s nice. Sofas. Magazines. It’ll be good.”
She was too unfocused to argue. And maybe I was too unfocused as well. Or too focused in a certain direction, to the detriment of another. We clanged on up the steps of the old warehouse and when Jenna greeted me, her face fell, almost imperceptibly, but not quite.
“You’ve brought a friend!” Her chirpiness barely concealed confusion, or disapproval.
“This is my—this is Stella,” I said.
“Nice to meet you,” said Jenna. She shook Stella’s hand and offered to get her some water or tea, if she’d like? She directed her to a sofa upholstered in a rich green velvet with chrome accents, by a low glass table with an arrangement of fresh-cut flowers. Stella sat down quietly and I knew I’d made a mistake, a tactical error. Stella—in a thin shirt you could see her black bra through and the striped shorts she’d slept in the night before, half-dressed essentially, her face still blotchy from crying—was something I never really expected she could be: out of place. And I had put her there.
Jenna walked me back to Samira’s office and once again I was the elk whose attention she tried to hold, only this time I got the feeling they were having second thoughts about elk. They had been planning to give an elk a chance but now they’d realized they needed a wilier, quicker creature in this role.
The conversation with Samira went well, though. She really did seem happy to see me again. We talked in more detail about the work, the scope of the position, about salary in terms that were agreeable if still vague. I pitched a few ideas to her, ways I might do things, strategies I had, and she was more than receptive. It was so easy to fall into cliché, she said, and she loved that I wasn’t bringing tired thinking to this, that I wasn’t afraid to be a little out there. I wasn’t sure what she meant by “out there” but I went with it, and she was so effusive and encouraging I almost forgot to be distracted. But when she walked me to the front, when I awkwardly introduced her to Stella, a light went out, some brightness in her extinguished itself. Samira had a son—Raf, she called him. Kindergarten age. She’d mentioned him a couple of times and there were pictures on her desk: curly hair, dark, liquid eyes. She understood the challenge of balancing work and family. That sometimes there was no balance, only spillage, and that that was life in late capitalist America. But she didn’t understand what this—Stella on the sofa—was. I didn’t understand what this was. The closest I can come to describing it is that I’d brought my child to the office before I’d even gotten the job, before I’d even
had a child.
We leaned against a railing by the channel, gray-brown water below, a deep blue, cloudless sky above, the old mercantile buildings, the narrow streets at our backs. Two women you would see in a photograph, dark hair lifted and blown a little in the breeze, one younger, one older, and wonder what they were to each other, how they came to be standing there in exhaustion and some release.
But I’m making us into an image, a suspended moment, and we couldn’t be that. I wasn’t sure what we could be, out in the world, away from the seclusion of camp. Samira and Jenna were up there in their loft office looking at each other like: What the fuck was that? Samira was crossing me off her list, irritated that she still had to fill this job, but relieved, too. Dodged that bullet, Jenna would say. Guess it’s back to the drawing board? And Samira would agree, despite being a little crestfallen by Jenna’s reliance on conversational clichés. Maybe . . . ? Samira, second-guessing the situation, reminding herself of my not-tired ideas . . . maybe . . . no. Just no.
I saw us through a Samira-Jenna lens: Stella and I met online, we’re into role playing, some kind of aunt-niece game, and because we’re no longer getting off on it quite as easily, we let it get out of hand, we brought them, Samira and Jenna, into it, by way of an actual, not-pretend job interview. Using them without their consent. So wrong on so many levels.
I couldn’t unsee us this way. How wrong they thought we were.
Stella was silent as we drove out of the city, until we were on the highway, passing under road signs with the names of towns she grew up around, and she said: Shit. She hadn’t called in to work, she was supposed to be there right now.
“Have they called you?” I asked.
The Summer Demands Page 14